The 56th America's Blood Centers Summer Meeting is coming up next week in Montreal, QC! As with all ABC meetings, this is a premier place for blood community leaders to experience peer-to-peer collaboration and networking, exclusive educational events, and the opportunity to hear about the latest trends impacting work of community blood centers.

Incept is a place where relationships matter. We're a creative, diverse, and engaging community uniting more than 200 team members with Fortune 500 companies, blood centers, and B2B sales teams across the United States and we want to share some of the stories from the people that make this team great every day.

Recruiting blood donors on Facebook is a key part of many blood centers' marketing mix. With 1 billion daily active users, it's likely the best place to attract, engage, and convert a broad range or precisely targeted donors.

We've partnered with several blood centers to launch new Facebook campaigns with the goal of recruiting more blood donors in a way that's less intrusive than telerecruitment calls and at a lower cost per acquisition. This journey has been one of great learning and we want to share it with you.

Incept is a place where relationships matter. We're a creative, diverse, and engaging community uniting more than 200 team members with Fortune 500 companies, blood centers, and B2B sales teams across the United States and we want to share some of the stories from the people that make this team great every day.

On May 11, 2018, James Harrison gave his 1,173rd and final blood donation, a habit he committed to for the last 60 years.

Known as "The Man With the Golden Arm," Harrison's blood contains a rare antibody that is used as a component of a lifesaving medication called Anti-D, used to protect unborn babies from potentially deadly blood incompatible with their pregnant mothers.

Last week, Facebook held its second annual Social Good Forum and made several exciting announcements that look to make a really positive impact on the blood donor recruitment industry around the world.

On the heels of announcing their changed mission this summer from connecting people to "[giving] the people the power to build community and bring the world closer together," Facebook announced the expansion of their new Blood Donation Sign Up tool, among others.

The world of tele-recruitment is changing. New legislation in the federal government, technological advances on cell phones, and the culture of the world at large have drastically changed the landscape from what it was just several years ago.

When I have asked internal tele-recruitment departments why they are not hitting goal, I most often hear one or two different answers. They feel they are understaffed OR they feel the donors are all too busy to donate. I am here to tell you – these are emotional answers, so please be empathetic with your team if you hear these, but there’s likely a different reason.

Traditionally there are 3 factors that impact the ability to reach goal:

Facebook and Hubspot are partnering up this week to bring users live stream video content about the changing landscape of social media and how businesses should react to it. We attended the first session which included a panel of experts talking about major trends in social media and how you can adapt your marketing strategy to take advantage of them.

One of the most popular talking points was around Facebook Messenger Ads and their growing impact on businesses. Did you know that every month over 2 billion messages are exchanged between people and businesses on Facebook? It's becoming a more natural, and maybe even preferred, way of communicating with businesses for many people.

In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, Texas and Louisiana have been left to recover from what could be the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history. More than 50 inches of rain and widespread flooding led to catastrophic damage and imminent risk to lives of local patients. The threat to the blood supply in Texas and Louisiana continues to put more lives at risk as we estimate more than 6,000 people were not able to donate because of the storm.

As blood centers on the east coast prepare for the onslaught of Hurricane Irma, we wanted to share some of the key points and learnings from the last few weeks with the storms in Texas/Louisiana region in case they spurred additional thought or help to your processes in preparing for Irma’s arrival:

As more and more baby boomers age out of being able to donate blood, either for health reasons or for personal ones, our stable donor base changes! We are used to our baby boomers steady donation schedules, sense of duty, and commitment to saving lives. These donors are going to be replaced with a completely new group of donors—the millennials.

At this point, we have all heard about “right type” blood donor recruitment. We are all working on automated donations and increasing efficiency in blood donation. But do we realize the financial importance of these decisions?

A time for cookouts, beach days, vacations, and fun! Unless of course, you’re a blood banker. For us it is brainstorming, low inventory, and sheer stress on how we are possibly going to make goal. But don’t be fooled. This blog is more about the winter holidays than summer.

OK, by now you are using text, but you might be wondering if you are using it correctly, or getting the most from it. Text isn’t just a new means of pushing the same message and if you are using it that way, keep reading!

Hey everyone! I just wanted to write you a quick note because lately this has been a hot topic. Blood centers are inquiring about engaging with Incept, in the event of an outage or disaster, to have us “on the ready”. For the few that have picked up the phone and called us, let’s be honest, they each had a major event (power outage, flood, phone system issue) that left them without the ability to call their donors for several days. So they called Incept to see if we could help.

As with many industries, the way we communicate with our donors needs to change. We can’t keep doing what we’ve always done and expect better or even different results.

Our approach to developing a solid communication strategy begins with a collaborative meeting between recruitment, marketing, and Incept. What we are finding is that so much of our communication is done in silos and we need to begin to break down those barriers and integrate our communication.

This is a great question and probably one of my favorite stories. Before I answer the question though, I think it’s important to understand how Incept, as a company, got started.

In 1993, two brothers who were call center managers for a large non-profit focused call center, set out to start a consulting business that would literally manage telemarketing campaigns on behalf of non-profits, so that the non-profits had experts representing them and could hold call centers to the highest-level integrity and results.

After conducting a Gap Analysis to determine why you need a co-source partner, the next step is to hold your departments accountable and determine where resources are lacking to achieve your high-level strategic objectives.

I’m often asked if a blood center needs to outsource EVERYTHING in order to get the most out of a partnership with Incept.

The simple answer is absolutely not! We usually hold a half-day needs assessment session with our clients to determine what’s right for them. Here are some tips to start conceptualizing what’s right for you.

Is your blood center struggling to meet goal with your existing donor base? Is your donor base simply not large enough or are you struggling to convince them to take action?

We ran a test for a mid-sized blood center who was struggling with exactly this. We approached the test using an omni-channel approach, first combining tele-recruitment and Facebook strategies that resulted in an 8.2% increase in successful donations.

Companies with omnichannel (integrated touchpoints) customer engagement strategies retain on average 89% of their customers compared to 33% for companies multi-channel (non-integrated touchpoints) customer engagement. But only 14% of organizations say they are currently running coordinated marketing campaigns across all channels.

This can be tough for blood centers. How are you supposed to know where to start? Video is so expensive - how could you even afford that kind of marketing strategy? Unfortunately, it's more of a question of "when" than "if."

To help you get started, we've put together a list of 4 tips for using video to recruit blood donors:

Each year during National Blood Donor Month, we commit ourselves to raising awareness of the often decreased blood supply during the winter months. This season tends to be a struggle for many blood centers across the country as they compete with holiday activities, snowy road conditions, and seasonal illnesses.

1.39 billion people per month use Facebook, with the average time spent on the social network totally 40 minutes. Blood centers not only need to be using Facebook, but need to be using it in a strategic way to make the greatest impact.